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Books : Mystery & Thrillers : Authors, A-Z : ( P ) : Pronzini, Bill
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The police said it was an accident, the dead woman's sister said it was murder... and that she knew who did it. Nameless isn't certain, but the more he learns about Nancy Mathias's life, the more inclined he is to accept the likelihood of murder--especially as the players still alive become more and more distasteful. Combine that with the situation Jake Runyon, one of the agency's partners, is facing as he searches for a young man who is either a murderer or a victim, and life at their San Francisco detective agency has everyone on edge.
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Nameless had told Mitchell Krochek that he’d do whatever he could to find his missing wife, Janice. She’d run away before—propelled by a gambling fever that grew ever higher—and Mitch had always taken her back. This time, when Nameless, his partner Tamara, and the agency’s chief operative Jake Runyon finally found her in a sleazy San Francisco hotel, she demanded a divorce.
A few days later, a beaten and bloody Janice stumbled into the agency begging to go home. No one is surprised when, soon after her homecoming, she disappears again.
But gambling addiction has a way of twisting things, and the blood on Mitchell and Janice Krochek’s kitchen floor was a card off the bottom of the deck.
Janice is missing again, Mitchell is the prime suspect, and as Nameless searches for the truth behind her disappearance, he uncovers a vicious racket that preys on gambling fever victims…
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What are the ingredients of a hard-boiled detective story? "Savagery, style, sophistication, sleuthing and sex," said Ellery Queen. Often a desperate blond, a jealous husband, and, of course, a tough-but-tender P.I. the likes of Sam Spade or Philop Marlowe. Perhaps Raymond Chandler summed it up best in his description of Dashiell Hammett's style: "Hammett gave murder back to the kind of people that commit it....He put these people down on paper as they were, and he made them talk and think in the language they customarily used for these purposes."
Hard-Boiled: An Anthology of American Crime Stories is the largest and most comprehensive collection of its kind, with over half of the stories never published before in book form. Included are thirty-six sublimely suspenseful stories that chronicle the evolutiuon of this quintessentially American art form, from its earliest beginnings during the Golden Age of the legendary pulp magazine Black Mask in the 1920s, to the arrival of the tough digest Manhunt in the 1950s, and finally leading up to present-day hard-boiled stories by such writers as James Ellroy. Here are eight decades worth of the best writing about betrayal, murder, and mayhem: from Hammett's 1925 tour de force "The Scorched Face," in which the disappearance of two sisters leads Hammett's never-named detective, the Continental Op, straight into a web of sexual blackmail amidst the West Coast elite, to Ed Gorman's 1992 "The Long Silence After," a gripping and powerful rendezvous involving a middle class insurance executive, a Chicago streetwalker, and a loaded .38. Other delectable contributions include "Brush Fire" by James M. Cain, author of The Postman Always Rings Twice, Raymond Chandler's "I'll Be Waiting," where, for once, the femme fatale is not blond but a redhead, a Ross Macdonald mystery starring Macdonald's most famous creation, the cryptic Lew Archer, and "The Screen Test of Mike Hammer" by the one and only Micky Spillane. The hard-boiled cult has more in common with the legendary lawmen of the Wild West than with the gentleman and lady sleuths of traditional drawing room mysteries, and this direct line of descent is on brilliant display in two of the most subtle and tautly written stories in the collection, Elmore Leonard's "3:10 to Yuma" and John D. MacDonald's "Nor Iron Bars." Other contributors include Evan Hunter (better known as Ed McBain), Jim Thompson, Helen Nielsen, Margaret Maron, Andrew Vachss, Faye Kellerman, and Lawrence Block.
Compellingly and compulsively readable, Hard-Boiled: An Anthology of American Crime Stories is a page-turner no mystery lover will want to be without. Containing many notable rarities, it celebrates a genre that has profoundly shaped not only American literature and film, but how we see our heroes and oursleves.
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Here Comes a Candle is Fredric Brown at his most audacious in a novel that was far ahead of its time. It is the story of Joe Bailey, whose young life is at a crossroads. Not only is he involved with a tough Milwaukee racketeer and two completely different women, but he is haunted by childhood trauma. Psychologically complex and told in an array of stylistic variations, it is a tour de force with a savagely ironic ending not to be soon forgotten.
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With its roots in the American private-detective fiction of the 1920s but traceable back as far as Sherlock Holmes, the private-eye story remains as popular as ever. Here are thirty of the finest short novels and stories from the hardboiled world of the private eye. The characters in this collection range from the tough, cynical, hard-drinking Philip Marlowe type to hard-hitting female sleuths and the one-armed intellectual Dan Fortune. This collection features old favorites and new contributions from masters of the genre, past and present, including Ross Macdonald, Raymond Chandler, Sue Grafton, Marcia Muller, Michael Collins, Ed McBain, William Campbell Gault, and many more.
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"An almost perfect book, spare, balanced, and inexplicably moving."-Geoffrey O'Brien
Jim Vanning has an identity crisis. Is he an innocent artist who just happens to have some very dangerous people interested in him? Or is he a killer on the lam from his last murder-with a satchel worth over $300,000 in tow?
Relentlessly focused, Nightfall may be David Goodis' most accomplished novel. It is a fiendishly constructed maze, filled with unpredictable pitfalls and human predators whose authenticity only makes them more terrifying.
David Goodis (19171967), a former pulp, radio, and Hollywood script writer, is now recognized as a leading author of crime fiction. Besides sojourns in New York City and Hollywood, he lived primarily in Philadelphia.
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Attending a private eye convention in her hometown, Sharon McCone catches up with old friends, until one is suddenly killed in a suspicious fall and recruits Wolf, the Nameless Detective, for her investigation. Reprint. PW.
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A simple case gets murderously complicated when "Nameless," Bill Pronzini's seasoned private-eye, exposes a nasty scam that involves junior account executive Jay Cohalan, his unhappy wife, and a mistress with a serious drug problem. It's the kind of case "Nameless" likes, because bleeders—the blackmailers, extortionists, small-time grifters, and other opportunists who prey on the weak and gullible—top his list of worthless human parasites. So there's nothing he enjoys more than putting another one or two of them out of commission and returning the $75,000 in blackmail cash to its rightful owner. "Nameless," though, cannot so easily close his Cohalan file—not when he finds his client face down in the middle of a four-poster bed with a bloody, powder-scorched hole behind the right ear. And only by a hair's breadth does "Nameless" himself escape a similar cold-blooded fate. His mind and gut wrenched by his brush with death, "Nameless" embarks on a relentless hunt for his unknown assailant in San Francisco's shadowy underworld. There he encounters bleeders of every ilk before he finds his quarry—and confronts his own demons—in a climax as powerful as it is shocking and unexpected.
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From award-winning editor Bill Pronzini comes The Mammoth Book of Short Spy Novels—a classic book updated for spymasters. Thirteen outstanding spy and espionage novellas, complete and unabridged, are gathered here in one terrific volume. They represent a specially chosen collection from the most accomplished writers in the field, including W. Somerset Maugham on Ashenden, his operative in World War I and Ian Fleming on 007 in the Caribbean, as well as Leslie Charteris, Erle Stanley Gardner, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and John Jakes, among others. These works span more than seventy-five years of espionage writing in the United States and England, and feature secret agents, counterspies, and double agents in settings from Japan to the former Eastern Bloc, and from World War I onward.
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Collects the best American crime stories ever published, culled from the pulp magazines of the thirties, forties, and fifties and featuring such titles as ""Dime Detective,"" ""Black Mask,"" and ""The Shadow."" Original."
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EVERYONE IS MOURNING SOMETHING
Nameless has seen enough death in his years; spending his time watching someone drive to several funerals a day, funerals for people Nameless doesn't even know, is more than he can take.
Then the bits and pieces begin to fall into place: The funerals James Troxell is attending are all for women who died violently. Is he the killer? One woman thinks so--she insists Troxell is the one who murdered her sister.
But there are too many deaths, too many roads leading nowhere, too many crimes and secrets and fears. This might be the one case that breaks Nameless--but the mourning has to stop, so Nameless will have to see it through…
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William Campbell Gault won the Edgar from the Mystery Writers of America and the Life Achievement Award from the Private Eye Writers of America, but Marksman is the first collection of his extraordinary short stories from the pulps and from great digest magazines including Manhunt. The collection begins with six non-series tales showing the range of Gault’s approach to the mystery story, and continues with the entire short–story career of private–eye Joe Puma.The stories are not only fast–paced and colorful, but as the editor, Bill Pronzini, puts it in his introduction, they are filled with "finely tuned dialogue, wry humor, sharp social observation, a vivid evocation of both upper class and bottom feeder lifestyles, and most importantly, the portrayal of people, in Fredric Brown’s words, so real and vivid that you’ll think you know them personally."
The sixth in the Lost Classics series concludes with an affectionate reminiscence of her father by Shelley Gault.
The cover painting is by Tom Roberts, one of the finest of the neo-pulp artists, combining the pulp emphasis on action and menace with modern detailed realism.
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In Bill Pronzini's harrowing novel of entrapment, suffering, transmogrification and revenge a detective is abducted by a masked man who will tell him only that the object is revenge; Nameless awakens to find himself chained to a table in a remote cabin, provided thirteen weeks food and water within arms reach and with only his resources and courage to rely upon as he seeks to escape from this death sentence.